legionaries must have felt the same way, too. So did King David’s warriors, chances were.
When Willi told that to Pfaff, his buddy snorted. “Who cares what David’s guys thought?” said the Landser with the gray Mauser. “They were nothing but a bunch of kikes.”
Willi laughed, but nervously. He eyed Pfaff from under the beetling brim of his Stahlhelm. Was Pfaff joking, or did he mean that? Willi had no enormous use for Jews, but he didn’t get all hot and bothered about them. He figured the Nazis’ hot air was just that and no more. Most of the soldiers in his outfit seemed to feel the same way.
Most, but not all. Some Landsers took all the hot air as seriously as SS men would. And some of these Russian villages and towns were chock full of Jews. He’d watched some bad things happen. He hadn’t joined in, but he also hadn’t tried to stop anything or report anybody. Reporting, he knew instinctively, was a waste of time at best, and might land him in trouble. Better to look the other way.
So far as he knew, Pfaff hadn’t killed kikes for the fun of it or soaked a Jew’s beard in oil and set it on fire or done anything else along those lines. So far as he knew, his buddy hadn’t gang-raped any Jewish-or Russian- women, either. But that was only so far as he knew. One of the things he knew for sure was that he didn’t know very far.
Artillery shells howled past overhead. Those weren’t from the 88s: they were 105s, searching for the Russians on the ground. And it didn’t sound as if any of them would fall dangerously short. You were just as maimed if your own side’s shell blew off your leg as you were when the enemy did it to you.
MG-34s rattled, off to the northeast. Slower-firing Russian machine guns answered. Willi’s stomach knotted, the way it always did when he got close to places where he could get hurt. He unslung his rifle and made sure he had a cartridge in the chamber. “Ready to have some fun?” he asked.
“Aber naturlich!” Adam Pfaff said, as gaily as if he were a girl Willi had invited to dance. But this was the Totentanz, and not everyone would get up after the drumbeat of death stopped.
“Let’s go! Forward! We’ll give the Untermenschen the hiding they’ve got coming to them!” Awful Arno shouted. He was a true believer in all the stuff Dr. Goebbels cranked out, sure as hell. But then he said the magic words: “Follow me!”
He might be-as far as Willi was concerned, he had to be-the biggest unwiped asshole in the history of the world. If only he were yellow, that would have made the perfect finish for his personality, such as it was: a maraschino cherry on a bowl of ice cream, so to speak. But, whatever else you could say about Arno Baatz, you couldn’t call him a coward. He was as brave as anyone could want a soldier to be, and then a little more besides.
And anyone who yelled “Follow me!” commonly found men who would follow. A noncom or officer laying his own life on the line got Landsers to do the same. Even colonels and generals led from the front in this war. People who’d gone through the mill the last time talked about how their superiors stayed kilometers behind the line and ordered them to their doom. No more.
Those MG-34s were firing from hastily dug foxholes, not from a regular trench line. With the front so fluid, there was no regular trench line. Soldiers in Feldgrau crouched in other foxholes and sprawled behind scrapes that might or might not stop a bullet. Some of them got up and advanced with the newly arrived units. Others stayed right where they were. They did lay down supporting fire for the troops moving forward. Willi gave them… some… credit for that.
A bullet cracked past his head. He threw himself flat and wriggled forward on his belly through grass tall enough to hide him from the Russians-as long as he didn’t do anything stupid like sticking his butt in the air, anyhow. Every so often, he’d go up on one knee, fire, and then flatten out again. Nobody was tracking his movements, anyhow: the proof of which was, he didn’t get killed when he popped up.
He wondered how the Russians used this stretch of ground when no one was fighting over it. Did they graze sheep or cattle or horses on it? Or did it just lie here not doing anything? Germany didn’t have much land like that, but Russia seemed full of it. The country was so goddamn big that, even though it had a lot of people, it didn’t have nearly enough to use all these vast sweeps of ground. This one might have been forgotten-or, for all Willi knew, maybe no one had ever paid enough heed to it to begin with for anybody to forget it now.
The direction from which enemy fire came told him which way to crawl. The grass smelled all green and growing. A rich scent rose from the black earth, too. Willi might be a city boy, but his nose said the Ivans were missing a bet by not raising wheat or beets or something right here.
Then that nose of his almost ran into the snub nose of a Red Army soldier crawling through the grass toward the German positions. Both men yelped in horror. Neither had had the slightest idea the other was there till the sea of grass parted and they nearly banged heads.
Willi tried to aim his Mauser at the Russian. The Ivan had a rifle, too, but jerked his hand away from it as if it were red-hot. “Kamerad!” he bleated, and “Freund!” After that, he gabbled out a stream of Russian, of which Willi understood not a word.
He could have murdered the Red Army man in cold blood. He had no doubt Awful Arno would have plugged the Ivan without a second thought, or even a first one. But the guy was trying to surrender. Willi supposed he was, anyhow. The Russian didn’t say boo when Willi grabbed his rifle. Then Willi frisked him-he didn’t want to send the guy on his way and end up catching a grenade. Like the English, the Russians used round bombs. They held less explosive than a German potato-masher, but you could throw them farther. Willi confiscated the three on the Ivan’s belt, and his sheathed bayonet, too.
He found the soldier’s identity book. It had a photograph of the guy and a bunch of writing in an alphabet that was just squiggles to Willi. He handed it back to the Ivan. Why not? It wasn’t any use to him. He jerked his thumb toward the southwest, the direction from which the German advance was coming.
The Russian gave forth with what Willi guessed were thanks. He was pretty sure spasibo meant danke, anyhow. “Go on,” Willi said roughly, hoping he hadn’t missed any lethal hardware-or that, if he had, the dirty, scared-looking, sorry son of a bitch in khaki wasn’t inclined to use it.
Off Ivan went. What happened to him afterwards, Willi never knew. He cared very little. The guy didn’t double back on him or have a spare grenade Willi’d missed. That, Willi cared about. He crawled on. The Landsers behind the line could send the Russian to a POW camp. Or they could shoot him, if they decided they’d sooner do that. It wasn’t Willi’s worry. The Red Army men still ahead were.
Out through the Kiel Canal. The abrupt change in the U-30’s motion would have told Julius Lemp when they got out into open water even if he’d been below. But he was up on the U-boat’s conning tower. As soon as the North Sea waves started slapping the boat, she began rolling in the way he’d found so familiar for so long.
One of the ratings up there with him didn’t take the new motion for granted like the skipper. “Fuck me,” the sailor said, gulping. “I’d forgotten how rough it gets out on the open sea.”
“If you’ve got to puke, Hans, don’t puke into the wind,” Lemp advised. “The idea is to get rid of what ails you, not to wear it.”
“Right.” Hans gulped again.
“If you can’t keep scanning, I’ll send you below with a bucket and call up somebody who can,” Lemp said. “Now that England’s turned her coat, we’ve got to worry about the Royal Navy and the RAF again. They aren’t half-assed like the Russians. Give them even a piece of a chance and they’ll sink us.”
“I’ll stay, Skipper,” Hans said quickly. Lemp would have said the same thing in his unhappy place. Up here, the fresh air fought seasickness. Down inside the reeking pressure hull, the boat’s rolling would have a potent, pungent ally.
All the same, Lemp knew he would have to watch Hans as well as the horizon. He hadn’t been joking. Anyone inefficient up here would have to go. You might get away with taking chances against the sloppy Slavs. Against the English? A good thing everyone had a will on file.
Diesels thrumming through the soles of Lemp’s shoes, the U-30 made fifteen knots on a course a little west of due north. The boat would round Norway’s southwestern bulge and then follow the country’s coastline farther north and east. Too many Tommies on the Ostfront had made their way through Soviet lines. The easiest, fastest way to bring them back to England would be to ship them out of Arkhangelsk or Murmansk.
The Fuhrer didn’t want them to come home-and who could blame him? Sooner or later, probably sooner, they’d get back into the war against the Reich. Better to send the freighters or liners carrying them to the bottom. Then Germany wouldn’t need to worry about them any more.
